Coping with Semantic Variation Points in Domain-Specific Modeling Languages

Abstract

Even if they exhibit differences, many Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) share elements from their concepts, notations and semantics. StateCharts is a well known family of DSMLs that share many concepts but exhibit notational differences and many execution semantics variants (called Semantic Variation Points – SVPs –). For instance, when two conflicting transitions in a state machine are enabled by the same event occurrence, which transition is fired depends on the language variant (Harel original StateCharts, UML, Rhapsody, etc.) supported by the execution tool. Tools usually provide only one implementation of SVPs. It complicates communication both between tools and end-users, and hinders the co-existence of multiple variants. More generally, Language Workbenches dedicated to the specification and implementation of eXecutable Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (xDSMLs) often do not offer the tools and facilities to manage these SVPs, making it a time-consuming and troublesome activity. In this paper, we describe a modularized approach to the operational execution semantics of xDSMLs and show how it allows us to manage SVPs. We illustrate this proposal on StateCharts.